When BlackBerry Messenger 7 launched last December, it brought with it a very interesting new feature – BBM Voice. This allowed for voice calls over WiFi with other BBM contacts, and very quickly it caught on. So quickly, in fact, that BlackBerry has announced there have been over 50 million BBM Voice calls placed since the release of BBM 7.

This is a huge figure to hit, especially considering that OS 5 devices only received BBM Voice support earlier today. But perhaps it shouldn’t be all that surprising – although I don’t use it too often myself, the response I’ve heard from other users has been overwhelmingly positive. The quality is said to be excellent, and it’s convenient to have if your mobile plan is short on minutes or if you’re just unable to connect to the mobile network for whatever reason. BBM Voice continues to live on in BlackBerry 10, so we can probably expect this figure to grow tremendously over the next while.